Response to Intervention (RTI): What teachers of reading need to know.

Mesmer, E.M., & Mesmer, H.A.E. (2008). Response to Intervention (RTI): What teachers of reading need to know. The Reading teacher, 62(4), 280-290.


There’s some good, clear information here about Response to Intervention (RTI), the new paradigm for determining whether a student’s reading difficulties are a result of a learning disability (and thus warranting special education) or a result of inappropriate instruction. The concern with the old “discrepancy” model, which compared IQ and achievement was that a) too much time was spent on “diagnosing” and actual interventions were delayed, b) special education often didn’t work anyway, and c) with the discrepancy model, minority kids were being disproportionally placed in special ed., when their “problems” could have been caused by test bias or culturally inappropriate instruction that was a “mismatch,” RTI purports to fix these problems.

There are problems with RTI, and the authors do give a bit of space to those, though it’s small and at the end of the article. I, too, am concerned with RTI’s over-emphasis on atomistic decoding skills, and I’m not sure assessments like DIBELS and PALS really assess reading. I do like the “instant help” feature, though, and anything that keeps kids out of special education is good in my book.